Griffin Poetry Prize-winning poet A.F. Moritz, editor of this year’s Best Canadian Poetry, chats with The National Post’s The Afterword.

“The annual anthology can be a magnet, I think, for the many people who would like to know contemporary poetry but are blocked, sometimes by lack of access, and sometimes by bewilderment, a sense that they don’t know which they should try of the many magazines, and which of the many new books by poets they don’t know by reputation. The Best Canadian Poetry gives a window on that world that is complete in itself but also can act as a guide to further exploration.”

“Moritz explains that for him, the hallmark of good writing or creating is complete absorption. Writing poetry is his entrance into “a time that is both outside of time and before time.” His passion and reverence for the craft is refreshing, and his rhetorical awareness of the meaning of poetry is compelling.”Full Review.

It may have been unseasonably cold in the Big Apple last week, but “the city that never sleeps” enjoyed some unexpected literary heat thanks to a collection of Canada’s top poets. The New York launch festivities for The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008 were kicked off by the Canadian Consulate reception on October 15th with honoured guest “Best American Poetry” editor David Lehman.

The official New York launch was held the next night in front of a packed house at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. Series Editor Molly Peacock and Guest Editor Stephanie Bolster introduced the readings, which featured contributors James Arthur, Leanne Averbach, Yvonne Blower, Barry Dempster, Jim Nason, Peter Norman, E. Alex Pierce, Joy Russell, David Seymour and A.F. Moritz. In response to the poets’ strong performances and engaging personalities, the book table sold its full complement of anthology copies.

The NYU event was followed the next day with another packed house at the legendary Bowery Poetry Club. This lively afternoon reading featured the same “Best Canadian” poets who performed the night before – giving New Yorkers a final chance to hear more of the amazing poetic talent that Canada has to offer.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 is the inaugural volume of this series in Canada. Edited by Stephanie Bolster, the series editor is Molly Peacock.

“Who do you think you are?” asks Stephanie Bolster at the beginning of her introduction to The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008. It is a phrase, she explains, that refers to a “reluctance to pronounce a viewpoint,” making an apt launching point for a discussion on the responsibilities of the role of editor in a ‘best of’ series. “Who do you think you are?” echoing the Alice Munro story of that title, is also a political statement, for Bolster and in this context conveying a sense of what it is to be Canadian, to be a woman, to be a poet.

As an American, a United States citizen writing a review on The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, I, also, begin by asking myself, “Who do you think you are?” Most of what I think I know about Canada, its literature, music and art, feels somehow mythic and iconic. Northrop Frye, the Group of Seven, Gordon Lightfoot, Stan Rogers, Leonard Cohen, several successful writers of fiction, and Anne Carson come to mind. And of the country itself, though I’ve taken three road trips through Canada, twice west and once east, with stops in many of its major cities, I’ve found that what I know best about Canada is that it is diverse, and not at all easy to define.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English: 2009

Edited by A.F. Moritz, Series Editor: Molly Peacock

In this anthology, this year’s guest editor, award winning poet A. F. Moritz, has selected 50 of the best Canadian poems published in 2008 from the long list of 100 poems drawn from Canadian literary journals and magazines.

A. F. Moritz has written more than 10 books of poetry, has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and has won the Award in Literature of the American Academy of the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He recently won Poetry magazine’s Bess Hoskin Prize for 2004. Moritz was honoured for his poem “The Sentinel”, published in January 2004. His latest book The Sentinel was short listed for the Governor General’s Award and is shortlisted for the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Victoria University.

Molly Peacock is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush published by W.W. Norton in the U.S. and UK and M&S in Canada, Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems published by Penguin Canada. She is also the Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. Before she emigrated to canada in 1992, she was one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on the buses and subways in New York City, and she served as an early advisor to Poetry On The Way. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The paris Review, and the TLS. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Michale Groden, an English Professor at the University of Western Ontario.